Remembering the deadly Russian double-tap strike on Ukraine

On January 6th, eleven people were killed and ten more were injured in the Ukrianian city of Pokrovsk was hit by a Russian S-300 missile. Five of those killed were children making it the most deadly attack Pokrovsk had seen since Moscow's double strike in August 2023.

Russia has committed a number of troubling attacks against Ukraine since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of the country, but few were as deadly as the double-tap strike that hit Pokrovsk

The set of double airstrikes on the Pokrovsk left as many as seven people dead in the deadliest attacks that occurred in August. But what happened in the city and what exactly is a double-tap strike?

Five civilians as well as one rescue worker and one soldier were killed in the attacks according to information revealed by Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko at the time, which was reported on by CNN. 

The death toll of the attack was later raised to ten and as many as eighty-eight people were counted among the wounded once the dust had settled according to the final casualty figures published by Wikipedia.

Most of those injured were made up of police officers and rescue workers who rushed to assist others after the first strike. However, they couldn't have anticipated that there would be a follow-up strike.  

The second missile attack hit a hotel that had been abandoned for five weeks according to the Head of Pokrovsk’s City Military Administration Serhii Dobriak. 

“Half of the building is gone, so it’s good that no one was inside,” Dobriak said. “This is just terror…“This does not intimidate us, but people are dying and suffering,” he added. 

Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed it fired on a command center but Dobriak told CNN that there weren’t any military targets near the city of Pokrovsk.

Dobriak also noted the attacks were a “typical Russian scenario” and that the air strikes came thirty to forty minutes apart from each other according to CBC News. 

"When rescuers come to save people's lives, another rocket arrives. And the number of casualties increases," Dobriak told local media CBC reported. 

Pavlo Kyrylenko posted an update on the attacks to his official Telegram channel where he noted 81 people were wounded, which included 39 civilians and 2 children. 

The remainder of the injured were made up of 31 police officers, 7 employees from the State Emergency Service, and 4 military personnel while 12 high-rise buildings were damaged. 

Kyrylenko also revealed that Iskander missiles were used in the attack on Pokrovsk and ended his update by calling Russia a terrorist state that must be punished for its crimes. 

The damage to Pokrovsk’s city center was quite severe and images from the aftermath of the attack revealed the devastating effectiveness of the two Iskander missile strikes. 

"Today is not my happy day because Russian criminals committed another awful crime in Pokrovsk," explained Volodymyr Nikulin in a video he sent to the Associated Press. 

Nikulin was one of the many police officers injured in the second attack and he suffered a wound to his left hand and a pierced lung, though he later had it removed in Dnipro. 

The Associated Press had previously worked with Nikulin on a documentary about what happened in Mariupol during the earliest days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Ukraine’s National Police issued a statement on the strike which CNN quoted: “All of them were there when they were needed, putting their efforts into rescuing people after the first incoming.” 

Cleanup efforts in Pokrovsk continued on August 8th after they were halted at night due to the “high threat of repeated shelling” according to Ukraine’s Interior Minister as per Politico. 

At that time, the attack on Pokrovsk was the deadliest air strike on a civilian area in Ukraine since a popular pizzeria restaurant in Kramatorsk was destroyed in June, killing 11 people and wounding 61 according to figures from the New York Times.